How things look through an Oregonian's eyes

November 30, 2010

I can forgive politicans for most of the crap they inflict on us, because that's what I expect from them. Crap. But there's one malfeasance that's unforgivable:

Failing to protect the livability of our planet.

We can argue about the size and role of government, whether health care should be single payer or privatized, how the education system should operate, what the optimum level of taxation is -- all kinds of questions are open to avid discussion and debate.

Except how to preserve Earth in a fashion that will enable future generations to survive, prosper, and engage in their own efforts to decide the best way to live.

When it's obvious that we humans are failing to assure the viability of all-too-fragile ecosystems, political posturing needs to be put on hold, just as it should be on issues of national defense.

Here we're talking about global defense, an even more important battle. It baffles me when people speak about the need to balance economics and environmentalism. How the hell can a country, or the world, have a thriving economy without a viable environment?

It was moving to see how the Earth formed from clouds of material ejected from exploding stars, gravity gradually bringing particles together into a planet as a giant conglomeration of stardust formed into the Sun.

More than once, huge meteors have crashed into the Earth. Three hundred million years ago, if I remember correctly, was when one such catastrophe caused the dinosaurs and countless other species to go extinct.

We live on a fragile planet. And a very special one.

Hawking described the unusual conditions that make it possible for life to arise and evolve on Earth. Not through a creator or a design -- simply because if those conditions weren't as they are, we wouldn't be here, able to marvel at how rare and precious our marvelously habitable planet is.

Also, for people like me, to marvel at how idiotic, brainless, self-centered, clueless, and uncaring some Homo sapiens are, those who shrug off the clear and present danger our one and only Earth faces from global climate change.

Those same science-bashing, reality-denying people undoubtedly have insurance on their houses, even though the risk of a fire, flood, or whatever that would destroy their habitation is much smaller than the risk of impending human-caused climate change disasters.

Yet they're not willing to buy insurance for the Earth, for reasons that range from the ridiculous to the patently absurd. Reducing carbon emissions by moving to renewable energy sources will be both economically productive and environmentally wise. So what's not to like?

Giving up short-term profits, scoring passing political points, and paying off campaign contributors. That's the best I can come up with. In short, bullshit piled on top of the usual political crap.

In the December 6 issue of Newsweek, science writer Sharon Begley talked about how climate scientists now are able to specify the "fractional risk attribution" of extreme weather events.

This shows "how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference" and "the probability of the same extreme event in today's greenhouse-forced atmosphere."

The result: Bluntly put, we're fucking up the planet. Life took 4.5 billion years to arrive at us, and within a few centuries we're doing our best to extinguish it.

Begley ends with:

The word “interesting” covers a lot of sins, which is why it’s the perfect word for the world’s current response to climate change.

That response is no response, as shown by the low expectations for the international climate meeting this week in Cancún, by China’s voracious appetite for coal, and by the Senate’s failure to pass a climate bill.

It’s interesting that people refuse to make changes today to stave off disasters years hence. It’s interesting that memories—of killer storms and heat waves—are so short, with people apparently viewing them as one-offs rather than harbingers of what we’ll suffer regularly in a greenhouse world.

It’s interesting that we saw Muscovites and Pakistanis dying, and blithely thought, too bad, but hey, it isn’t me. All of which means that the climate we are creating will be … interesting.

November 28, 2010

Since I'm eligible for social security benefits, I've got retired-time now to solve the world's problems. After pondering where to start over several Grande Christmas Blend coffees at Starbucks, here's my choice:

Shortening winter to one month.

I picked this problem rather than nuclear disarmament, famine, environmental degradation, or Middle East peace for a couple of reasons.

One, winter is my least favorite season, so I'm personally motivated to shorten it as much as possible. Two, with sufficient caffeine in my system to stimulate my steadily aging brain, it didn't take me long to figure out a way to make winter last one month.

Before revealing this solution to my fellow winter-haters, a suggestion: you will find what I have to say more convincing if you're in the right frame of mind.

By which I mean, sufficiently inebriated and/or stoned to recognize the brilliance of my logic -- which may seem illogical to those who refuse to free their minds from the confines of a calendarcentric way of looking upon reality.

If you've had that second (or better yet, third) glass of wine or joint of marijuana, read on...

Here in the Oregon'ish reaches of the northern hemisphere, I've always considered the seasons to be composed of whole months, with winter running from December to February. Pleasingly, this also is how Wikipedia says meteorologists view seasonality:

Meteorological seasons are reckoned by temperature, with summer being the hottest quarter of the year and winter the coldest quarter of the year. Using this reckoning, the Roman calendar began the year and the spring season on the first of March, with each season occupying three months.

In 1780 the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, an early international organization for meteorology, defined seasons as groupings of three whole months. Ever since, professional meteorologists all over the world have used this definition. So, in meteorology for the Northern hemisphere: spring begins on 1 March, summer on 1 June, autumn on 1 September, and winter on 1 December.

So winter is bracketed by autumn's September, October, November and spring's March, April, May.

OK, let's work with that, squeezing winter from both sides until a couple of months drop off. Psychologically -- which is all that counts, since the sun and tilt of the Earth are going to keep on doing their thing. (This is why you need to be in that special frame of mind.)

Having come to the last days of November, let's hearken back to the early part of the month. It was warmer and nicer, right? After all, November is part of fall, a.k.a. autumn.

Thanksgiving isn't a winter holiday. Neither is Halloween. When a few weeks are added on to the end of fall, that's no big deal. Just a rounding error. The early part of December is a continuation of autumn, really.

And the last part of December... that's a whirlwind of shopping, parties, decorating, standing in line at the post office, and realizing on December 23 you forgot to get a gift which means forking out more for overnight delivery than the damn thing costs.

With all that craziness going on, there's no way to focus on the seasons. Thus the only part of December that might fall into what we used to call "winter" is the first few weeks, and we've decided that this actually is autumn.

Ergo: December isn't a winter month. Let's move on.

To February, the gateway to spring since it nuzzles up to March. In March daylight savings time returns, making late afternoons much sunnier. Bulbs pop up, bringing color to gardens. Like they say, "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb."

But hey, who are they to make such a hard and fast statement? Lions have been known to lay down with lambs. (I found this photo on the Internet, so it must be real.)

March can come in like a lamb and go out like a lamb. For sure. No doubt about it. So let's go with the lambiness of that month.

And then extend that nice spring weather back a few weeks. After all, global warming is happening. Spring is coming earlier.

The season can now be expected to arrive a week and a half earlier than it did in the mid 1970s, the wide-ranging study of plant and animal behaviour found.

Daffodils now commonly bloom in January and swallows can arrive in February rather than March.

Yes! Science rules! We must obey!

February now is part of spring, not winter. Mission accomplished: winter has been shortened to one month, January.

We can handle that. It isn't difficult to get through four measly weeks of winter.

Here in the United States, watching the national championship football game and Super Bowl can take up a good share of two of those weeks -- especially with a proper amount of napping before and after the games.

So winter isn't anything to get chilled about. It won't start until January 1 and will be over in thirty-one days. Happy almost-Spring!

November 26, 2010

Recently she gave me an update on the dismal mood of homeowners down there -- an attitude that doesn't bode well for the economy in general, given the importance of the housing market.

Celeste and her husband both have good jobs, for which they're thankful. They bought their house, after selling a condo, at close to the top of the housing bubble. Now their home's assessed value approximates their mortgage balance, since values have dropped considerably the past few years and they wisely put 20% down.

It was surprising to hear my daughter talk about how renting is the dream of southern Californians now. A couple she knows was able to sell their house before the market began to sink like a stone. They're renting a very nice place and looking forward to moving to an even better house when their contract is up.

Celeste said that for the price of their mortgage payment, they could rent a much larger house. Figures, I guess, given how tough it is to sell a house in southern California (or just about anywhere) these days.

According to Celeste, homeowners in her neighborhood are in a funk. They (and she) feel trapped. Mobility, such as moving to take advantage of a better job, is at a standstill. Whereas before people looked at home ownership as a way to get wealthy, now their houses are an anchor dragging down their net worth.

Most disturbing to me was the tale my daughter told about trying to get a home equity loan from the bank they've done business with for a long time.

Again, she and her husband have good jobs. They did things right with their mortgage: 30 year term, 20% down. They have little debt besides their mortgage. In short, they're the sort of solid people who are the backbone of our country's middle class.

They wanted $100,000 to remodel their small, 1920's era Hollywood home. Their daughter will be four next year; a family room and additional bedroom are badly needed. Plans in hand, they sat down with a bank employee.

"Nope," he said. "Why?" they asked. "The loan would be guaranteed by your signatures [salaries, I assume he meant}. That's the sort of thing that got us banks in trouble before."

Geez, deeply irritating.

Financial institutions got themselves in trouble by lending to people willy-nilly, and then trading those mortgages like they were Monopoly money, making huge risky bets. And now you're telling people such as my daughter and her husband, who had nothing to do with all that crazy wheeling/dealing crap, that they can't get a loan for a remodeling project that would give some construction guys some much needed work?

I'm no economist, but something is screwy here.

Banks are getting essentially free money from the Federal Reserve. They pay zero interest, or close to it, for the money that could be lent out. Yet they're sitting on it, choosing to say No! to people with solid jobs and decent incomes who want to invest in some home improvements (or business investments).

My daughter is a strong Obama supporter. But she clearly is disappointed with how economic recovery policies are tilted toward Wall Street and away from Main Street, where she and her family figuratively reside.

Sure, the housing bubble had to burst. The market is southern California, as elsewhere, was way overheated. However, now it is way too frigid, from what my daughter tells me.

When people are depressed about home ownership, they're not going to be eager to buy other big ticket items. So until the housing market shows some signs of life, the economic outlook for the U.S. will be pretty dismal.

Banks aren't helping, from what my daughter tells me. They should be leading, given all the aid Congress and the Federal Reserve have thrown at them.

Tomorrow Oregon State plays Stanford, whose Heisman-worthy quarterback is Andrew Luck. A few days ago on the evening news, I saw a clip of Luck leveling a California defender during a run.

It was so impressive I had to search out the play on You Tube for a closer look.

Like the announcer says, Luck absorbed the attempted tackle. (Watch the closeup at about the one minute mark for the best view.)

This looks Tai Chi'ish to me. In my Tai Chi class there's a big guy who used to play high school football. Sometimes he talks about how basic Tai Chi principles like centering, grounding, non-resistance, and the like play out, so to speak, on the football field.

That's borne out by this analysis of stills from the Luck video. Luck is quoted as saying that he knocked over the safety thanks to momentum and inertia.

But a commenter differs:

As physics was my major at Stanford ...

I can tell you it’s not all about mass. Kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared as well as mass. Even more important are things like leverage and having your feet planted.

Luck’s feet were planted, so his muscles could push against the ground to absorb the energy of Cattouse without moving Luck. You can see from the pictures of Cattouse that his feet were not planted. He launched himself against the upper half of Luck, a technique that might work if you’re blindsiding someone who’s already off balance, but not someone who’s ready for you.

Yes, that's pure Tai Chi.

You can see Luck rotating his body as he's hit while his feet are firmly planted. That enabled him to absorb the safety's energy and redirect it back onto the defender, who collapsed on the ground while Luck rambled onward down the field -- after looking surprised that he was still on his feet and the other guy wasn't.

My Tai Chi instructor does some training of athletes in various college sports: volleyball, football, track and field. There's a lot in common between seemingly way-different activities. The body only moves in certain ways. Some ways are more effective than others.

Andrew Luck's big hit on the Cal safety testifies to the importance of staying grounded while those around you are flying around. Good advice for both the football field and life in general.

(Note: my wife wanted me to clarify that I don't go to strip clubs. I just admire Oregon for being free to have so many of them. Also, to the online commenters who thought my piece was a satire -- it isn't.)

November 24, 2010

I've changed my mind about Regence BlueCross of Oregon. And not for the better. In a previous post I called Regence "heartless," after seriously considering the adjective "evil."

After enduring two more months of bureaucratic bullshit from Regence concerning my wife's dry eye problem, I've decided that stronger words are needed to describe how this company screws over longtime individual policy-holders like us.

As described before, we were forced by Regence BlueCross of Oregon to switch to new policies as of July 1, 2010. These "Evolve" plans actually were a devolution: for the same premium, we got substantially fewer benefits -- so Regence hid a large price increase by making Blue Selections policy holders switch to the crappier Evolve plans.

Laurel, my wife, was able to change from a low-end Blue Selections plan to the top-of-the-line Evolve plan after some arguing with Regence.

Restasis, a prescription drug for dry eyes, always had been covered by Regence under Laurel's basic Blue Selections plan. There was no indication on the Evolve plan application materials that Regence had changed its formulary. And Laurel figured that since she was being switched to a higher-end plan, the drug benefits would be better or the same, not worse.

Wrong. Because Regence is both heartless and evil.

The company seems to be dedicated to providing the least possible health care to its policyholders, so it can keep paying inflated salaries to its executives and continue funding all those employees whose sole purpose is denying claims for needed services.

Such as Restasis.

Laurel has gone through several levels of Regence appeals. She keeps being told that Restasis isn't a covered prescription because it isn't in the formulary. When she asks why it no longer is in the Regence formulary, there's no answer. It just isn't.

Today we got a letter from Regence that said:

Our Pharmacy and Therapeutics committee has determined Restasis is non-preferred (non-formulary) medication because there is no reliable evidence to conclude that Restasis provides any clinical advantages or is safer than other alternative treatment options.

That's a lie.

My wife has researched dry eye treatment options extensively. She's been advised to take Restasis by a opthalmologist at the Oregon Health Sciences University who is a leading dry eye expert. There is no generic alternative to Restasis. Other steroid eye drops have significantly greater risks, as does tear duct blocking surgery, while over the counter don't work very well.

Restasis is the only prescription eye drop proven to help increase natural tear production. Restasis works by decreasing inflammation in the lacrimal glands of the lids. The lacrimal gland is primarily responsible for most of the eye's natural tear production.

Since this is one of the most effective and successful dry eye therapies, we use it as one of the first line weapons in the fight against dry eye. We also prefer Restasis because it has been proven to be safe for long term use, and it increases the bodies [sic] natural tear production instead of relying on artificial formulations.

Yet somehow Regence BlueCross of Oregon, which covered Restasis for years under Laurel's Blue Selections Plan, suddenly discovered that this safe and effective treatment for dry eye didn't provide "any clinical advantages" at the very same time Regence forced its individual policy holders to switch to an Evolve plan that offered worse benefits at the same or higher cost.

Also, Regence still has Restasis in its Medicare formulary. So Regence considers it to be a fine drug for use by people sixty-five or older, but not for those, like Laurel, in their early 60's.

Equally irritating is this fact: Regence pays 50% of the cost of Restasis for those Evolve Plan members with a $1,000 deductible, but 0% for those (like Laurel) who have a $2,500 deductible. On Laurel's previous Blue Selections plan, Regence also paid 50% of the cost of her Restasis.

So even though Regence told us it has concluded that Restasis doesn't provide "any clinical advantages or is safer than other alternative treatment options," this evil/heartless insurance company will pay for it if you have a $1,000 deductible, but not if you have a $2,500 deductible.

Regence needs to contribute to dry eye treatment research by publishing a paper which describes how patients with a $1,000 deductible benefit from Restasis, while those with a $2,500 deductible don't.

Of course, they can't do that. Regence is denying payment for Laurel's Restasis so it can make more money, not for any clinical reason.

November 22, 2010

I'm a frequent Amazon shopper. Until recently I'd resisted the invitation to sign up for Amazon Prime:

Amazon Prime is a membership program that gives you and your family unlimited fast shipping, such as FREE Two-Day shipping and One-day shipping for $3.99 per item on all eligible purchases for an annual membership fee of $79. Eligible customers can try out a membership by starting a free trial.

But when I needed to have a book delivered quickly to prepare for a discussion group meeting, I decided to use the free trial to get it shipped to me in two days. And now...

Damn you, Amazon, I'm hooked! (just as you planned)

So soon my VISA card will be charged the $79 annual fee, because for a frequent Amazon shopper like me, Amazon Prime is an excellent deal for reasons I'll explain below.

First, though, let's examine a question that I raised at the above-mentioned book discussion group, where we talked about globalization.

"When the UPS or Federal Express truck delivers an item ordered online to my home, is this more, or less, ecological than me driving into town (7-10 miles) to go shopping?"

I asked this because my Prius-driving environmental soul has been feeling a pang whenever the doorbell rings and I find another Amazon package dropped at our door. That large truck coming all the way into the south Salem countryside, just for me.

Which, of course, isn't true -- as another group member pointed out. He thought that online shopping saved energy, since the UPS truck continues on to deliver stuff elsewhere in our neighborhood. That's more efficient than lots of people driving around in their separate cars buying things.

A Center for Energy and Climate Solutions study supports this intuition.

In business-to-consumer e-commerce, for instance, a warehouse holds far more product per square foot than a retail store, and uses far less energy per square foot. We calculated the ratio of building energy per book sold in traditional bookstores versus on-line retailer Amazon.com to be 16-to-1. And contrary to what most people think, Internet shopping uses less energy to get a package to your house: Shipping 10 pounds of packages by overnight air -- the most energy-intensive delivery -- uses 40 percent less fuel than driving roundtrip to the mall. Shipping by truck saves 90 percent.

Most of the comments on a TerraPass question, "Is online shopping bad for the environment?", were similarly supportive of buying over the Internet. It saves energy, reducing carbon pollution, and thus is Earth-friendly.

Yay! No more guilt when the UPS truck pulls up. I can fully embrace Amazon Prime for these additional reasons.

Shipping cost is no longer a factor. Like this person, sometimes I used to buy something extra just to earn free shipping on a $25 Amazon purchase. Now I can order an $11 bottle of leather conditioner for a few bucks off the list price, pay nothing extra, and have the product in two days. (Of course, it's still sitting on our kitchen counter because I haven't gotten around to applying it to a couple of coats, but that isn't Amazon's fault.)

Fresh shopping options. I feel like a whole new shopping world has opened up for me. Meaning, I no longer have to wander around physical stores and shop as much. My wife, being a female "gatherer," enjoys browsing aisles a lot more than I do. As a male "hunter" of some specific product, I simply want to get ahold of the thing as quickly and easily as I can. Clicking a few keys on my laptop -- perfect!

Instant gratification closer at hand. Living as I do in our increasingly fast-paced world, it bothered me when I ordered something on Amazon and it'd take -- gasp! -- at least five days to get it. That'd seem like an eternity. Almost. Two day shipping is psychologically much more comfortable. Picturing an order arriving day after tomorrow puts the purchase in a different light. The instant gratification portion of my brain feels a lot more positive about ordering online now. And if I want something tomorrow, that's just $3.99 away.

I haven't worried much about whether I'll make back the $79 Amazon Prime annual fee in shipping costs. Since I easily order a couple of dozen items from Amazon each year, probably I will.

But as noted above, the other benefits of Amazon Prime make it a good buy for me even if the monetary aspect doesn't quite pencil out. Since I don't like shopping in stores, and find that buying online saves me both money and time, taking shipping charges out of the ordering equation has made me a happier Amazon customer.

Sure, not everything I want qualifies for Amazon Prime. So far, though, most of my purchases have.

And since I'm also helping to save the Earth with every lessened carbon footprint order, Amazon Prime appeals to both the materialistic and idealistic sides of me.

November 20, 2010

A friend of ours here in Salem, Russ Beaton, has written an open letter to President Obama that expresses what a lot of other people who voted for him in 2008 are feeling:

Good about what Obama has done so far, bad about his lack of evident zeal for moving the country further forward after the midterm election.

Throughout the arduous primary campaign, I eagerly listened to every speech and interview I could access. My early conclusions were always reinforced and my enthusiasm grew. I sent all that I could afford as campaign donations and continually worked for your candidacy as opposed to Hillary’s – who I believe would make an outstanding President. But we needed a fresher start with one not as connected with past successes, failures and political entanglements.

...Given this background of support, I am compelled to say that your comments in the press conference the day after the 2010 midterm elections were the first words I have ever heard from you that were truly disappointing. Even to an independent centrist and especially to an ardent supporter, your call for compromise and “working together” sounded like complete capitulation.

I hope you'll read Russ' entire three page letter. (A Word file can be downloaded below; I'll also attach the letter as a continuation to this post.)Download Open Letter to Obama

Russ is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Salem's Willamette University. Also, a Bearcats Hall of Fame tennis coach.

Read on for an excellent explanation of why progressives like me are disappointed with President Obama, yet still hopeful that our enthusiasm can be rekindled by seeing some sparks and fire emanate from the Oval Office.

November 18, 2010

If you're anywhere near my age, you'll remember the not-so-good old days of nuclear war fear: home bomb shelters, Cuban missile crisis, above ground tests in Nevada that caused radioactivity to show up in milk, and other scariness.

Almost everyone would agree that reducing nuclear arsenals is a good thing. Since 1992 this has happened through treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union (now reduced to Russia).

A New START treaty is ready to be ratified by the Senate.

Previous nuclear arms control treaties were approved by massive bipartisan margins: 93-6 in 1992 for the START I treaty signed by Republican President George H.W. Bush; 87-4 in 1996 for START II, also signed by George H.W. Bush; and 95-0 in 2003 for the Moscow Treaty signed by Republican President George W. Bush.

But now we live in the age of Senate Republican Stupid Time.

Even though a CNN poll shows that 73% of Americans want New START to be ratified, Senator Jon Kyl and other equally idiotic G.O.P. colleages are willing to put our national security at risk in an attempt to score political points.

The world’s nuclear wannabes, starting with Iran, should send a thank you note to Senator Jon Kyl. After months of negotiations with the White House, he has decided to try to block the lame-duck Senate from ratifying the New Start arms control treaty.

The treaty is so central to this country’s national security, and the objections from Mr. Kyl — and apparently the whole Republican leadership — are so absurd that the only explanation is their limitless desire to deny President Obama any legislative success.

The Republicans like to claim that they are the party of national security. We can only hope that other senators in the party will decide that the nation’s security interests must trump political maneuvering.

The treaty, the first with Russia in a decade, calls for both sides to reduce their deployed warheads modestly to 1,550 from 2,200. More important, it would restore “verification,” inspections and other exchanges of information about the American and Russian arsenals.

If the treaty founders, it would also do huge damage to American credibility just as Mr. Obama is making progress rallying many countries — including Russia — to press Iran to curb its illicit nuclear program.

Hmmmm. I thought the Republican party line after the midterm elections was "jobs, jobs, jobs." I don't think voters expected to get "nuclear proliferation, nuclear proliferation, nuclear proliferation."

Yesterday I listened on satellite radio's POTUS (Politics of the United States, a great channel, intelligent and factual) to a press conference featuring Secretary of State Clinton, Senator John Kerry, and Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican who is an expert on nuclear security policy.

Lugar has castigated his fellow Republicans for not recognizing the importance of ratifying the New START treaty as soon as possible.

Delaying until next year is a worst case scenario that could delay the treaty's ratification for months or even years as new senators request additional time to study the issue, and the committee process begins all over again, he said.

"Endless hearings, markup, back to trying to get some time on the floor... It will be some time before the treaty is ever heard from again," Lugar said.

Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation -- especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the former Soviet Union.

If START fails, the cooperation between the United States and Russia on securing loose nukes could be imperiled, representing an even bigger risk for national security, Lugar said.

"There are still thousands of missiles out there. You better get that through your heads," he said, directing his comments to members of his own party.

New START has gotten a through review. There's really no basis for serious objection to the treaty, other than "Obama is president, so we'll vote no." The New York Times says:

There have already been countless briefings and 21 Senate hearings on the treaty — sufficient for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the country’s top military leaders, six former secretaries of state (from both parties), five former secretaries of defense (from both parties) and seven former nuclear weapons commanders to endorse it.

As for concerns about “modernization,” President Obama has already promised an extra $84 billion over 10 years to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and its arsenal. That would raise spending 20 percent above the levels of the Bush years and is far more than we think is necessary.

Listening to Clinton, Kerry, and Lugar was refreshing. They spoke like the adults in the room, while Kyl and other Republicans spouting their no, no, no sound like two year olds having a tantrum.

This is no joke. We're talking freaking nuclear bombs here.

New START still allows the United States and Russia to each have 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. That's way too many, but 30% lower than what was allowed by the previous Moscow Treaty.

Yet ten incoming Republican Senators are demanding that the New START treaty be stopped, for undisclosed rational reasons.

As a Daily Kos post on this subject says, the newly elected Senators apparently don't believe that 1,550 nuclear warheads are enought to deter aggression from... someone undisclosed.

They're at oddswith Reagan's chief START negotiator, but in line with the desires of Iran and North Korea:

Dismantling the arguments against the New START treaty on the NewsHour last night, Richard Burt, the Reagan administration’s chief U.S. negotiator for the original START treaty, noted that “there are only two governments in the world that wouldn’t like to see this treaty ratified, the government in Tehran and the government in North Korea.”

Aside from the fact that nearly 75 percent of Americans want to see it ratified, Burt also warned that, if the treaty fails, not only would “we miss the opportunity to improve relations with the Russians, who have supported us on Iran and U.N. sanctions and increasingly in Afghanistan,” but the U.S. would also “lose all credibility on the problem of stopping nuclear proliferation.”

I hope the Senate votes on the New START treaty in the lame duck session. Then we'll see how patriotic and military-supporting the supposedly new and improved Republican party is. A vote against the treaty will be a vote against our national security.

Fortunately, it looks like Obama is going to fight for a December vote on the treaty.

It'll be interesting to see how many Republicans decide to stand on the side of nuclear proliferation. (That will make a lot of "soccer Moms" wonder why they voted G.O.P. this year.)

November 17, 2010

Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin's daughter, is a mediocre dancer. I've watched every episode of Dancing With the Stars this season, so I can testify to that. She's been in the bottom two many times, saved only by viewer votes -- not the judge's scores.

Last night Bristol made it into next week's final (top three will compete) by beating out Brandy, a far superior dancer. Brandy got 57 points from the judges on Monday, the competition night, including perfect 10's for her Tango, while Bristol got 53.

What bugs me -- a lot -- about the viewer voting is that Tea Party types appear to have hijacked it in a fraudulent manner for purely political ends. The rest of the blogosphere also is ticked off about this, for good reason.

When I went to vote for Jennifer Grey Monday night by phone after watching the recorded episode fairly late in the evening, I got a message that voting could only be done on the ABC web site now.

OK. I dutifully clicked on the "vote" button and was met with a request to register. I entered my real email address, along with other genuine information, and got to cast five votes.

I played the Dancing With the Stars voting game fairly.

But there's been a concerted effort by Tea Party types to make a political statement by elevating Bristol Palin into the finals (or even the championship, a dreadful thought) through fraudulent voting.

By fraudulent, I mean that ABC clearly intends that one person get five votes. Or at least, that one real email address gets five votes. However, the Jezebel web site has revealed "How Palin conservatives are cheating the DWTS voting system."

It's been alleged that the Tea Party's "Operation Bristol" is keeping the teen mom in the competition. However, the real conspiracy is that her conservative supporters have figured out a way to exploit ABC.com's email-voting feature, allowing infinite votes.

While Bristol Palin denies any Tea Party conspiracy theories, there's no denying that conservatives have been pushing for votes for Bristol, using blogs and Twitter to start a movement.

But what isn't widely known is the evidence—via message board comments on some conservative sites—that this mobilization involves fixing this (albeit meaningless) election through a technical snafu on ABC's website, which allows Palin's supporters to cast an infinite number of email votes:

Here's a hint: They don't have to be VALID email addresses to register them with ABC.com, there is apparently no validation process. The just have to be formatted like a valid email address, and you must use a valid zip code and a birthdate that makes you old enough to vote. I'm voting like a democrat, all night long…

No, it doesn't have to be a valid email address – I had one of my anonymous ones [email protected] that I used, and then just did the sign-up process all over again with [email protected] and it worked.

Got my 80 votes in online…took 2 hours. I am beat

I only got 42 in, I have some catching up to do!

Lord have mercy, I voted for 3 hours online! I got 300 in.

It doesn't bother me that conservatives are voting for Bristol Palin, even though she's a worse dancer than almost everybody who has been eliminated from Dancing With the Stars this season.

What irritates me, big time, is that the show's producers and ABC decided to make a political statement by featuring Bristol and her mother, Sarah, in a mid-term election year. (Sarah is shown in the front row at many of the competitions, and she's also featured in background stories about Bristol.)

This vitually guaranteed that Dancing With the Stars would morph into politics-centered viewer voting by Tea Party zealots. Many, if not most, could care less about the show, Bristol Palin, or dancing.

For conservatives, enjoy the fun of finally, at last, getting a taste of what it’s like to be a Democrat. You can vote as much as you want. You can vote using all sorts of names. You can vote all day. You can’t get paid to vote, because you aren’t really a Democrat, silly, but you can get as close as you can possibly get without being in a union or taking part in ACORN.

Dancing With the Stars made a big mistake in allowing political activism to take over an entertainment show in a fraudulent manner. I've lost all confidence in the DWTS voting system, and now view the finale as a joke.

My only reason for watching will be to see how many people in the audience boo if Bristol Palin wins the Mirror Ball trophy, which she has an excellent chance of doing given how Tea Party folks are willing to cheat in order to stack the voting for a bad dancer.

November 16, 2010

I used to work with a highly creative and socially conscious guy who told me once that he was always thinking about something.

Driving his car, brushing his teeth, eating his dinner -- most of the time his mind was occupied in pondering how to make the world better while his body was doing something else.

This probably made him more productive, but not more happy. Such is the conclusion of research I came across today in the New York Times: "When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays."

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

Well, this is pretty much what the Buddha taught several thousand years ago, along with countless other more modern yogis, sages, gurus, and meditation teachers. Indeed, a Boston reporter says her yoga instructor was right on top of this research, mentioning it in class.

If you want to be part of this ongoing study, and have an iPhone, head over to TrackYourHappiness.org and sign up to get an email or text message at random moments that asks you to report your happiness at the moment.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

I suspect, though, that one of the activities wasn't "being bothered by my iPhone when I'm having sex or otherwise happily engaged." But hey, advancing science comes with some costs.

Like most people, my mind is notoriously prone to wandering. I suppose it shouldn't, since I've meditated almost every day since I was twenty years old (I'm now much older and not much wiser at sixty-two).

I do find that concentrating on a mantra or my breath for 20-30 minutes starts off my morning in a focused manner. I enjoy not thinking much, or at all, about other stuff while I'm doing a single thing.

When I get going on my other activities of the day, I often backslide into what is called "monkey mind," internal chattering from lots of psychological tree tops that isn't related to what I'm actually doing.

This afternoon, though, inspired by the wandering mind = less happy research, I did better while grocery shopping. I consciously focused on each step I took from the parking lot into the south Salem Fred Meyer store.

Then I had a sense of slowing down, selecting one item at a time, being mindful of the details of choosing bananas, checking the expiration date on organic lettuce mix, finding an unfamiliar brand of hair conditioner that my wife had put on the list.

I really did feel happier shopping in this fashion. It struck me that external reality is considerably more interesting, by and large, than my thoughts -- which tend to be repetitive.

After loading the groceries into the back of our Hybrid Highlander and starting to drive off to the next shopping stop, I got another lesson in the value of mindfulness.

Still engaged in focusing on external reality, rather than my own mind, I saw a gorgeous young woman -- willowy, shapely, graceful -- walking through the parking lot. If I'd been zeroed in on what my psyche was chattering about, instead of what was sensuously present in the outside world, I could have missed her.

The research findings seem pretty obvious. But often we miss the obvious in our searching for happiness.

"Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all," the authors of the study, Harvard doctoral student Matthew Killingsworth and psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, write in the new paper. And that unique ability, they found, does not make for a happier species.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post with one of my favorite titles: "Chipmunk stalking, Kentucky TV, and Benzedrine." The theme was focus -- whether canine, fire-watching, or drug-aided. I ended with some thoughts that are echoed by the recent research.

Focus. Concentration. Being in the moment, no matter how much or how little is happening.

Why is this so easy for dogs and chipmunks? And for people in altered states of consciousness, like when they're sitting around a fire on a warm summer night? Or hosing cannery pulp into drains under the influence of a post-midnight Benzedrine?

Those little white amphetamine-filled pills were what got me through an otherwise shitty job at a San Jose cannery during one of my college summers.

My night shift was cleanly divided into two halves: unhappy and happy, the demarcation being when, after a "lunch" break at 3 am or so, I'd pop a bennie into my mouth.

Ah, what a difference some amphetamine would make! Sometimes my job would be to put on a rain suit, stand under the conveyor belts on which fruit pulp was dripping, and use a high pressure hose to direct the pulp into drains.

I hated the job pre-Benzedrine. Afterwards, I loved it. It was endlessly fascinating to train the water just so, artfully directing the spray to maximum pulp-washing effect. (Others, like W.H. Auden, have applied Benzedrine toward more creative pursuits.)

I'd also use Benzedrine as a study aid for sleep-inducing classes like Statistics. I remember preparing for a test where I could have read about T-tests all night, the normal curve and levels of significance being so astoundingly interesting.

Just like inching your way toward a chipmunk for almost an hour and a half can be, if you're a prey-obsessed canine. Or like watching an outdoor fire can be, if you're with pleasant company (which can be only yourself), the air is warm, and the stars are bright.

Simple pleasures, drug aided or not, often are the most satisfying. Frequently we forget this in our quest for the next exciting thing, as we're multi-entertaining our way through the day and night.

November 14, 2010

According to a New York Times story, if I live to be about 150 -- to the end of this century -- that dream will be at least three vertical feet closer to our current elevation of 440 feet, and possibly a lot more.

Scary, especially for those who already live in low-lying coastal areas, and for young people (plus those yet to be born) who will bear the brunt of global warming effects -- including sea level rise.

Reading "As Glaciers Melt, Science Seeks Data on Rising Seas" added to my worries about what sort of a world my granddaughter will be left with.

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.

But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.

The scientists say that a rise of even three feet would inundate low-lying lands in many countries, rendering some areas uninhabitable. It would cause coastal flooding of the sort that now happens once or twice a century to occur every few years. It would cause much faster erosion of beaches, barrier islands and marshes. It would contaminate fresh water supplies with salt.

Climate Progress, a must-read blog for anyone who wants to know the facts about climate change, has an extensive analysis of the NY Times story.

An expert on coastal planning, Orrin H. Pilkey, is quoted as advising infrastructure should be built five to seven feet above current sea level, given the rise expected by the end of the century.

Like I said, scary.

Global warming deniers must feel like they're being pushed by facts into an ever-smaller reality space. They like to say that, sure, sea levels are rising, but they've risen in the past by hundreds of feet, so what's the big deal?

Well, the big deal is that human civilization wasn't around when the Earth's ice sheets melted before. That's like saying the dinosaurs went extinct, so where's the problem if Homo sapiens goes extinct?

Climate change science is complicated. But the basic facts are simple. The Skeptical Science web site has them covered in The Big Picture.

The Earth is warming.Humans are causing this warming.The warming will continue.The net result will be bad.Arguments to the contrary are superficial.There are legitimate unresolved questions.

Bottom line:

The big picture is that we know the planet is warming, humans are causing it, there is a substantial risk to continuing on our current path, but we don't know exactly how large the risk is.

However, uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the risk is not an excuse to ignore it. We also know that if we continue on a business-as-usual path, the risk of catastrophic consequences is very high.

In fact, the larger the uncertainty, the greater the potential for the exceptionally high risk scenario to become reality. We need to continue to decrease the uncertainty, but it's also critical to acknowledge what we know and what questions have been resolved, and that taking no action is not an option.

November 12, 2010

The U.S. Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent guardian of our banking system, immune from pleas to do this or that from either politicans or regular citizens.

But since Sarah Palin felt free to critique the Fed's recent monetary policy actions (though many, including me, were surprised she even knew what the Fed did), I figured I might as well throw in my own request:

I'll confess to being minimally economically literate. But I know how to balance my checkbook (except when I can't). Last month I dutifully added 26 cents of interest after seeing that West Coast Bank had credited this to our account, which averaged a balance of $3,000 or so.

Wow. In a year I'll almost be able to buy a single large non-fat vanilla latte, my favorite coffeehouse drink.

Recently, though, I've been saving money (and calories) by ordering a grande Pike Place, brewed coffee, at Starbucks. It costs $1.80 and I throw a quarter into the tip jar. Which is almost exactly what we earn each month from our interest-bearing checking account.

In my whole 62 years I can't recall a time when what you earned on savings accounts was throwaway money. As a child I was taught a lesson by my mother that was echoed by financial advice from experts: keep a good share of your assets in savings.

But now people who have been cautious with their money are being screwed by current interest rates. The Fed gives money to banks at essentially zero interest. That also is just about what seniors and other folks who used to rely on income from savings are getting: zero.

Our Schwab money market fund has a yield of .01%. That isn't 1% -- it's one-hundredth of a percent.

I don't want us to go back to the days of super-high inflation, but come on... how are retired people on fixed incomes who have been thrifty savers supposed to survive when interest rates are that low?

Currently the yield on 2-year Treasury notes is .51%, with 10-year bonds at 2.78%. And those yields are higher than they have been for quite a while. We own a 5-year government bond fund that's yielding 2.3% at the moment.

The Federal Reserve has said that it will buy $600 billion of Treasuries in an attempt to lower long-term interest rates and juice the economy. My reaction was "great" to juice the economy and "ugh!" to lower interest rates.

Scott Burns, a financial writer and advisor, calls what's happening "The Great American Bank Robbery." Federal Reserve actions have been a boon to banks, which get money to loan for almost free, and a disaster for seniors and others who have significant savings.

The largest bank robbery in history is in process, but no police cars have been dispatched to the scene of the crime.

That’s because no bank is being robbed. Instead, the banks are robbing their depositors. While all depositors are victims, some people are suffering greater losses than others. I call them “the Solvent Seniors.”

You are a Solvent Senior if you are old enough to be collecting Social Security, and your income on your savings is (or was) greater than your Social Security benefits. We’re talking about millions of people. According to the “Basic Facts of Social Security” 48 percent of married couples and 28 percent of single people have more income from savings and other sources than from Social Security. We’re not talking about rich people here, just people who saved to maintain their independence and dignity in their old age.

Television economist Lawrence Kudlow raves on CNBC about the opportunities in bank stocks and how much money banks can make with virtually no cost for deposits. What Mr. Kudlow and the other talking heads don’t mention is that the same conditions are a disaster for Solvent Seniors.

Worse, this can become a long-term disaster. As I pointed out in an earlier column, if you’re retired and get half your retirement income from interest on your savings, current interest rates translate into a whopping 23 percent drop in income from 2006, just a few years ago. What neither political party nor the Federal Reserve will admit is that every dime our banking system is making through low deposit costs is coming out of the pockets of savers. Some would call this theft, even though it isn’t being done with a gun. Others may say it’s a tax that doesn’t have to be called a tax. You decide.

OK, I will. It's a tax. It's robbery.

It's tilting economic policies in the favor of Wall Street vs. Main Street. I can see this happening every time I see that we've gotten a whole additional 25 cents in monthly interest on our savings of quite a few thousand dollars.

Let's get interest rates up, Federal Reserve -- at least beyond what I put into a Starbucks tip jar when I buy a cup of coffee.

November 10, 2010

I don't know why I gave this blog post the title I did. But that's how the Tao works: mysteriously.

Anyway, I like feeling special, and so far Google tells me that the Internet is bereft of Taoist (or in this case, pseudo-Taoist) musings about how raking leaves leads one to recognize his or her oneness with the cosmos.

By "one," of course, I mean me. So forget the "her" in the rest of this blog post, because in our home, contrary to our species' evolutionary history, the male is both the hunter and gatherer of leaves.

A few days ago Laurel did offer to rake up some leaves that were littered on our lawn. But by that time I was in the final stages of my masterful leaf-disposal system and I didn't want to dilute my feeling of accomplishment by having my wife involved in a minor way at the very end.

I have, you see, come to a understanding of the Meaning of Leaves after twenty years of dealing with them on our non-easy-care yard out here in rural south Salem (Oregon).

They simply do what nature would have them do. Leaves aren't out to drive me crazy come October and November, though sometimes in my darker leaf disposal moments it seemed that way.

If a James Bond movie featured an evil genius who was out to destroy the sanity of an arch-rival through malevolent leaf-manipulations, he would design a house with landscaping just like ours, arrange to have his enemy move into it, and then wait for him to fall apart.

Quite a few large oaks surround our home.

So no matter which way the wind is blowing, a massive amount of oak leaves will end up in our yard. Different trees also lose their leaves at different times, so just when I figure they're almost all picked up, the oaks do their tag-team thing and one will throw down a fresh bunch of leaves.

To make matters worse -- a lot worse -- our yard is filled with rocks, ground cover, heather, and other features which look great most of the time, yet become leaf magnets in the fall.

In addition, we've planted many deciduous trees over the past couple of decades. So the overall situation I'm faced with can be simply described as a leaf nightmare. At least, that's how I used to look upon it before I became a Taoist leaf-collection sage.

Last weekend I slipped into my old habit briefly when I interrupted my work for lunch, then said to Laurel, "Well, I'm back to the leaf wars." That was the old me speaking. The new me manages to mostly look upon the leaves as friends who simply need some nudging to get them into their proper places, since they aren't able to move purposefully on their own.

I actually look foward to dealing with the leaves.

Now that I have a system, albeit a constantly evolving one in accord with the ever-changing Tao, the three hours or so it takes me to do a complete run-through of our yard (which needs to be repeated several times in November) is a largely pleasurable opportunity to follow the Zen'ish adage "chop wood, carry water, rake leaves."

I don't need to think much about what I'm doing, which involves about an equal measure of raking and blowing. My Taoist leaf-disposal-sensibility took a big leap forward a few years ago when I bought a Stihl backpack blower to replace the handheld blower I'd been using before.

This converted me into an artist rather than a technician. The Stihl blower has a continuous control lever, whereas my old handheld one had discrete low/medium/high settings.

So now I can move leaves around with pleasing precision, especially when they're dry or semi-so. I've developed patterns that are adapted to the lay of our land, echoing nature in how water flows downhill, via valleys, until it reaches lakes and oceans.

Which in our yard are walkways, the lawn, and surrounding brush. Sometimes I can blow leaves directly into the untamed portion of our property; if not, I rake them into piles, put them into a large plastic leaf bag, then drag or carry them beyond the confines of our landscaping.

Many of them go on a trail leading to a nearby creek and lake that we walk on regularly. I enjoy treading on several inches of leaves rather than bare muddy ground.

Whenever possible, I follow a like-to-like approach. That is, I dump the contents close to whichever oak tree accounted for most of the leaves of that variety in the bag.

At the beginning and end of leaf season, sometimes the number of leaves on the lawn is amenable to being mowed over (studies show that leaving chopped-up leaves on grass works just fine).

Dealing with leaves has taught me a lot about life.

I've learned that I can't control what happens naturally. I'd prefer that all of the trees drop their leaves at the same time, so I could pick them up over the course of a week rather than a month. However, nature doesn't operate in accord with my preferences (if it did, I'd still look like I did when I was twenty).

I've learned that perfection isn't possible. I can't collect every leaf, nor would I want to. Our yard looks better when it has a rustic flavor to it, rather than artificially manicured.

I've learned that slow and steady is better than fast and erratic. I no longer wear myself out trying to extract stuck leaves from bushes, heather, and such at the same time as I'm doing the main leaf-collection deed. There will be time to refine the look of our yard during the (occasional) dry days of winter, when I enjoy picking up those stuck leaves by hand.

I've learned that I'm not the center of the leaf-universe. Though I'll admit that we've cut down a few scrubby oaks in our yard mostly because they were annoying leaf-droppers, I've come to look upon myself as an interloper in the much longer life span of the large oaks.

Some of them, we've been told by arborists, are well over 200 years old. They may have been growing during the Revolutionary War. Certainly during the War of 1812. Those oaks were here long before me, and some or all will be here long after me.

Along that line, it dawned on me as I was dealing with leaves last weekend that the trees on our property are steadily growing bigger, hence leafier, at the same time my vitality is on a shrinking trajectory. So every year the leaves likely will be more numerous while my ability to handle them diminishes (slowly, I hope; so far my 62 year old body feels just as leaf-collecting capable as it always has).

My wife and I bought our home when we were about 40. The sellers were a couple in their 60's who said they'd gotten to the point where they couldn't handle the upkeep on the house and property anymore.

For a long time, when someone asked how we ended up here I'd say, "We bought from an elderly couple who'd found the house had become too much trouble to deal with." Now, for obvious reasons related to our birthdates, I change "elderly" to "in their 60s."

I'm grateful that I'm still able and willing to blow, rake, and carry the mountains of leaves that fall in our yard each year. I hope to be able to carry on with my annual leafy get-together for a long time. Yet I realize that one year will be the last year I'm able to do this.

Almost certainly I won't be able to anticipate when that will be. Death and disability usually don't announce their impending arrival with any sort of calendarish precision. So all I can do is continue flowing with the leaf-falling as if this time could be the final time.

There would be worse ways to take a last breath than with a Stihl blower on my back, engaged in dealing with the recurring cycle of tree-life. Way worse ways.

Unfortunately, the campaign to bring more facts and less irrationality into policy debates isn't quite as aggressive as the LA Times story said (which was reprinted in the Portland Oregonian, where I read it this morning).

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday's election.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

My wife and I thought that sounded great. And I'm confident that the reporter who wrote the story actually did talk with scientists who are eager to go toe-to-toe with the many crazies in Congress who ignore solid research in favor of their own right-wing dogmatism.

However, the American Geophysical Union issued a press release saying that they aren't campaigning against climate change skeptics or congressional conservatives. They just want to provide accurate answers to questions from journalists about climate science.

Well, that's better than nothing. More encouraging, because more aggressive, is a separate effort by John Abraham that's also mentioned in the LA Times story.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a "climate rapid response team," which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.

"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk CountyCommunity College in New York.

"We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed."

Absolutely true.

A distressingly large percentage of so-called conservatives in the United States aren't interested in conserving. Nor, in reality. This is exceedingly dangerous to the nation's health, along with the world's.

It's an only in America thing.

Conservatives in Britain recognize the serious threat global warming poses. For some reason -- likely our excess of fundamentalist religiosity -- lots of people in the United States are afraid of truths revealed by science.

This morning I read a chapter in Bruce Hood's "Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable" called Who Created Creationism? Hood says:

The problem is that the majority of U.S. adults believe that a supreme being, namely God, guided the origin and diversity of life on earth. They believe that in the beginning God created earth and all its life forms and that there has been no significant change since that day.

...The reason this is a problem is that it highlights a paradox of modern America. The United States is one of the most scientifically and technologically advanced nations on the planet.

...Yet less than half of the U.S. population accepts a comprehensive scientific theory that explains the origins and diversity of life on earth. When it comes to the general public's acceptance of Darwin's theory of natural selection, the United States is second from the bottom of the list of the top thirty-four industrialized nations.

This helps explain why facts about global climate change are met with a similar head-in-the-sand attitude by a large proportion of both the American citizeny and their elected officials.

They don't trust science because it is viewed as threatening their religious beliefs. I can sort of understand this fear when it comes to evolution (though God could have used natural selection as His means of creating us Homo sapiens).

But it's difficult to see how climate change research undermines anyone's faith-based beliefs. Apparently a mistrust of science is so pervasive among fundamentalist folks, it carries over to scientific facts that have nothing to do with God.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us reality-loving citizens have to take a stand against global warming deniers.

Like Abraham said, it isn't enough to present factual truths. When someone has his or her head in the sand, they can't hear what you're saying if you speak normally. You've got to raise the volume, matching their obtuseness with your assertiveness.

Abraham recognizes that scientists have a duty to stand up for our children, grandchildren, and irreplaceable planet.

On the other hand, the general public and members of government are split on this issue. Half are concerned about global warming, half are not. Why is that? A major reason is that there is a great deal of bad information which typically germinates in the blogosphere and is created by people with little or no real expertise.

We know that solving this problem will require real effort. We are on a path to cause real destruction to our planet and even if we were only interested in self-preservation we should take action.

We are also not naive in recognising that there is a political aspect to this. It is well known, at least in the United States, that conservatives tend to be much more sceptical about climate change than liberals. We need to move beyond partisanship toward co-operation. Conservatives care about the environment too and there have been many who have made comments about the need to act on climate change. History will look unkindly on those who have stood in the way of saving the planet, which will be an enormous political liability – although by then it will be too late to fix things.

The timing of these campaigns was not linked to the recent elections in the US. The American Geophysical Union's effort coincides with the Cancún climate conference, a timing that is primarily motivated by a recognition that scientists have an obligation to defend the science and engage with the public.

We are both scientists and human beings. As scientists, we need to find ways to communicate accurate scientific information to a wider audience in a way that is policy-neutral. As humans, we are concerned not only for ourselves, but also for our children and for people in the world who don't have the necessary resources to adapt to the coming change. As a human, I have an obligation to speak up for them.

It is a shame that scientists have to take personal and professional risks in order to be good citizens of the planet. It doesn't have to be this way.

Here's an extensive slide presentation by Abraham where he debunks a presentation by Christopher Monckton, a noted global warming denier who screws up the science big time.

And the link below leads to a report where Abraham and others respond to Monckton's erroneous testimony this year before a congressional committee dealing with climate change.Download Response to Monckton

Excerpt:

Briefly, Mr. Monckton makes a number of scientific assertions about (1) the efficacy of warming from CO2, (2) the benefits of elevated CO2, (3) the relationship between CO2 and ocean acidification, (4) recent global temperature trends, (5) and the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. He has also claimed that (6) there is no need to take quick action to address the changing climate. In all cases, Mr. Monckton’s assertions are shown to be without merit – they are based on a thorough misunderstanding of the science of climate change.

We believe the responses contained here strongly refute the statements made by Mr. Monckton. It is our hope that this document will be of use to members of Congress and their staffs as further hearings and debates on climate change and energy policy take place. We would be pleased to respond to any inquiries and offer necessary clarifications.

November 06, 2010

John Kitzhaber, a Democrat who recently was elected Oregon's governor, is a physician. He's already helped to heal my progressive depression over the national midterm election results.

But I can tell that Republican craziness in Congress, now that they control the House, is going to upset my psyche almost as much as Kitzhaber's win (and Jon Stewart's rally) restored sanity to my political soul.

Today I read that the GOP plans to try to starve health care reform enactment by cutting off funding. This is chicken-shit and stupid, as almost everything Congressional Republicans do these days is.

For example, they want to prevent the IRS from hiring agents to enforce the requirement that every American have health insurance by a certain date. Yet they also claim to support the notion that insurance companies can't deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The plain fact is that you can't have one without the other. That's where stupid comes in.

Anyone with half a brain can see that if people could wait and only buy a health insurance policy after they get seriously sick, that's what many, if not most, would do -- just as I'd prefer to pay a premium for auto insurance only after I had an accident and needed repairs.

If Republicans had an open discussion with citizens about what they wanted to change in the health care reform bill, the need to require insurance coverage would be seen to go hand in hand with eliminating pre-existing condition limitations.

Since the "R's" don't have the guts to be open about this, that's where chicken-shit comes in. They don't want voters to know that they're against popular provisions in the health care reform bill, so are trying to undo the bill in a sneaky manner.

We can do better here in Oregon.

I'm confident that our state politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are smarter and gutsier than those in Congress. And John Kitzhaber is a creative health policy expert who can lead our state to becoming a model for the nation.

He's spoken about this in his campaign speeches. He's planned for this through his Archimedes Movement. He's written about this on his John Kitzhaber for Governor web site.

Oregon has always been a national leader in health care innovation and I know that Oregon can and will face up to the challenge of fundamentally reforming the health care delivery system which is crucial if we hope to reduce cost and improve the health of Americans. Our federalist system encourages states to be the “laboratories of democracy,” trying and testing innovative solutions. Whatever the results of the current health care debate in Congress, America is going to need innovation and new thinking from the states to solve this most critical challenge.

One idea posted from a citizen, Bruce Mulligan of Eugene, is to create a public insurance option for Oregonians. Excellent notion.

This should have been included in the national bill, but hopefully Kitzhaber and our congressional delegation can find a way to make it happen here in Oregon, showing the rest of the country how it can be done and why it is such a good idea.

My wife and I are in our early 60's. Currently we send $1,024 a month off to Regence Blue Cross of Oregon for increasingly crappy individual coverage.

Regence is a hugely irritating bureaucracy, dedicated to providing as little health care as possible to its customers while maintaining a vast expensive staff whose sole job is to say "no, you can't have this drug, procedure, or test that your doctor says you need."

We'd love to be able to sign up with a state-run health insurance plan along the lines of the "Medicare For All" public option that was proposed for the national health care reform bill. There's little doubt that such a plan could provide better care at less cost, given the waste, inefficiencies, and high-paid executives in private plans such as Regence.

This country spends about twice as much on health care as other advanced industrial democracies -- a gigantic drain on our economic competitiveness, given how much businesses have to pay for employee benefits.

Soon-to-be Governor Kitzhaber should link genuine health care reform in Oregon with job-creation. If we can reduce health insurance costs to companies here, while making the Oregon work force (along with everybody else) healthier, that's a clear win-win for both businesses and individuals -- something Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on.

In Washington, DC, it looks like gridlock is going to prevail for the next few years. Here in Oregon, we can keep moving forward. This state already is a leader in sustainable land use policies, renewable energy, and #1 football teams.

November 04, 2010

Ah, it was just what the doctor ordered, a fitting phrase since John Kitzhaber is a physician. Yesterday afternoon I learned that he'd earned a late-breaking victory and will become Oregon's governor...again (he served two terms from 1995-2003).

As I predicted a few days ago before the national election returns started to come in, by midnight Tuesday my state of mind was hovering in the "depressed" zone. My wife wasn't helping with her the country is doomed mutterings.

When we went to bed Kitzhaber was about 13,000 votes behind. Waking up on Wednesday, I rushed to my laptop to see the Oregonian's current totals. Kitzhaber was still trailing Dudley, but a click on the nifty map showed that Dem-friendly Multnomah County had only counted 72% of its votes.

[Note to the KGW election news team: The Oregonian is your news partner, as your 11 pm news tells me every evening. It took me about thirty seconds to go to the newspaper's web site and find the above-mentioned map where the percentage of ballots counted was clearly shown. So your election anchors embarassed themselves late Tuesday evening when a commentator pointed out that Dudley's lead almost certainly would disappear given where the outstanding ballots were going to come from, and they said (in so many words) "Gosh, who knew? We had no idea..."]

I fired up my iPhone's TweetDeck app and added a search for "ORelection." The rest of the day I enjoyed following the many tweets posted by people who, like me, were obsessively tracking the Oregon governor's race results.

Sometime in the morning when Kitzhaber was down about 18,000 votes I dealt with my anxiety by getting out a calculator, doing some basic math, and putting up my own prescient tweet.

I sort of figured that outstanding votes in Kitzhaber-leaning Lane County would be balanced by votes still to be counted in the generally Dudley-favoring rest of the state (other than Multnomah county).

Currently Kitzhaber is up by about 13,000 votes, so kudos to me, from me. Of course, quite a few others were making similar predictions. Multnomah County often determines close Oregon elections, so it wasn't a major act of genius to focus on what was happening with the vote count there.

Around 4:30 pm yesterday, as I was heading to my Tai Chi class, I took another look at what the #ORelection tweets were saying. My spirits lifted a lot when I saw that a TV station (Channel 12) had called Kitzhaber the victor.

We live our lives locally, not nationally.

My body isn't spread out over the entire United States, which went Republican to a disturbing degree Tuesday. I live and breathe right here in Oregon almost all of the time, so the political status of this state means more to my mental health than what happens in Congress or elsewhere outside of Oregon's borders.

So thanks to everyone who worked so hard to pull out a narrow Kitzhaber victory. This includes my wife, Laurel, who spent quite a few hours before election day down at the Marion County Demoratic Party headquarters, phoning people who hadn't returned their ballots.

(Me, I did my part in the weeks before the election by sitting at my laptop and sending off regular donations to the Kitzhaber campaign, along with putting a Kitzhaber lawn sign back up every time the wind blew it over.)

It'll be interesting to see how Kitzhaber and the Democrats deal with a state legislature which is almost as evenly divided as the gubernatorial vote was. It looks like the House will be 30-30 and the Senate 16-14 in favor of the Dems.

Kitzhaber said the right things today in his first televised remarks after being declared the victor. He noted, hopefully correctly, that it could be easier to deal with a legislature almost equally divided between R's and D's than if one party or the other was in firm control.

Compromising and center-finding will be essential. Fortunately, the state legislature has a larger proportion of moderate Republicans than Congress does. Some of them should be able to get behind Kitzhaber's plans to juice Oregon's economy and our already strong green energy sector.

Chris Dudley was courteous and magnaminous in defeat. He ran a fairly decent campaign, as did Kitzhaber. I got tired of seeing their ads on Portland TV, but at least they weren't bat-shit crazy like so many campaign spots elsewhere in the country were.

A final anecdote:

Before heading to my Tai Chi class yesterday I stopped into a downtown bread store for some snacks. The girl behind the counter asked how my day was going. I said that I'd been kind of down after the election, but was feeling good after hearing that Kitzhaber had won.

She and her equally youthful male worker, who could hear our conversation, looked blank for a moment. Then she said, "Oh, right, the election..." I could tell that it was pretty much the last thing on their minds, whereas it was dominating my psyche. I suspect they were part of the many who voted in 2008, but sat out this election.

Sad. And difficult to understand in a state where all you have to do to vote is sit down at your kitchen table, mark a ballot, put a stamp on it, and stick it in the mail.

Another customer, a man, was standing behind me. He was dressed in a green cap and work clothes. Didn't look like the Prius-driving, Kitzhaber-voting, low-fat muffin type (in other words, not like me).

After I said that Kitzhaber had won, he said gruffly, "Remember what Stalin said: it's not the people who vote that count, but the people who count the votes." I felt it wouldn't be smart to tell him how stupid that comment was, especially here in virtually fraud-free Oregon, so walked out without another word.

It turns out that Stalin may not have said that (see here and here), but it's become an urban legend for conspiracy theory folks.

Such as Portland's right-wing talk show host, Lars Larson. Yesterday I heard him talking about the remaining votes to be counted in Multnomah County. He said that the process was going slowly, because it takes a while to manufacture votes.

How the guy keeps his job is beyond me. That comment was beyond irresponsible. If Larson has evidence of vote fraud in the Multnomah County elections division he should come forward with it. If not, he should shut his idiotic mouth.

There's already enough crazies out there, of the Tea Party variety and otherwise, who believe all sorts of unfounded conspiracy theories. People like Lars Larson, who gets to use the public airwaves, have a responsibility to clearly distinguish between opinion and fact.

Spreading a rumor that John Kitzhaber stole the election should be unacceptable to KXL management, who pay Larson's salary. I hope he gets called on the carpet for that remark. But I bet he won't.

November 02, 2010

It's not even 3:00 pm here in Oregon. But I need to write about today's midterm elections now, before I'm mentally unable to make sense.

After all, soon the polls will start closing in the east. Super-political-commentator Nate Silver will start live blogging on FiveThirtyEight in a few minutes. I'll do my best to resist, yet won't be able to stop obsessively watching online and on TV for early signs of what is to come.

I'm planning to start my late afternoon/evening in a caffeinated state. This is normal for me. However, I may need to jolt my brain into a 2-3 cup energized optimism before the big wave of election returns hit.

For a while I'll probably be able to imagine that the Democrats are going to do just fine, notwithstanding the dreary prognostications. Since I don't want to look like a idiot tomorrow, when the likely news of a Dem disaster is evident, I figure its better to keep my blogging mouth shut when I'm in the brief throes of this election isn't going to be so bad for progressives like me.

I also don't want to write any posts later tonight, when I'll have shifted from the coffee pot to a wine bottle.

Usually I only drink a single glass of red wine. However, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the inebriation wind is blowing for Dems this day: toward as much as necessary to blunt the pain of some distressing defeats.

Sure, maybe the election won't be as bad as expected. If the registered voter turnout is just a few points higher than the pundits are predicting, "D" losses could be limited to the normal mid-term result -- a marked, but not huge, rejection of politicians belonging to the president's party.

I'm aware, though, of how my psyche is engaging in some illogical thinking. In 2008 I perused the predictions of FiveThirtyEight several times a day, lapping up what turned out to be highly accurate forecasts of the election results, both presidential and other.

Currently Nate Silver says the Republicans will likely gain 53-54 seats in the House, which is quite a bit more than a normal mid-term. But instead of accepting that FiveThirtyEight is probably right, I've been seizing on a possible scenario Silver set forth where the Dems manage to hold the House.

(Naturally I did my best to ignore his mirror-image post, where the Republicans do much better than expected.)

The bottom line, though, is that when all is said, done, and reported tonight, my state of mind -- in whatever consciousness-altered form it is resting in -- will be largely determined by how Oregon results turn out.

If John Kitzhaber becomes governor, and Chris Dudley is sent back to his wealth management job, I'll be pretty happy no matter how the election goes nationally. If Kurt Schrader is re-elected as our congresshuman, even better.

And if Jason Freilinger beats out Patti Milne for Marion County commissioner, I'll be super pleased.

After all, even if the rest of the country tilts toward the crazy Republican side of the political spectrum, we Oregonians can create our own island of sanity and spend the next few years sitting under a pleasant palm tree of progressiveism.